Baker Academic

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

"People who have never been lynched by another group usually find it difficult to understand why blacks want whites to remember lynching atrocities. Why bring that up? Is it not best forgotten? Absolutely not! What happened to the hate that created the violence that lynched black people? Did it disappear? What happened to the hate that lynched Henry Smith in Texas (1892), John Carter in Arkansas (1927), and Reverend George W. Lee and Lemar Smith in Mississippi (1955)? Where did the hate go that opposed the black freedom movement and killed Martin Luther King Jr. and a hoste of white and black civil rights workers?... What happened to the indifference among white liberal religious leaders that fostered silence in the face of the lynching industry? Where is that indifference today? Did the hate and indifference vanish so that we no longer have to be concerned about them?... Unless we confront these questions today, hate and silence will continue to define our way of life in America....

Photo The New Yorker

Just as the Germans should never forget the Holocaust, Americans should never forget slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.... The cross of Jesus and the lynching tree of black victims are not literally the same--historically or theologically. Yet these two symbols or images are closely linked to Jesus' spiritual meaning for black and white life together in what historian Robert Handy has called 'Christian America.' Blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land. Neither blacks nor whites can be understood fully without reference to the other because of their common religious heritage as well as their joint relationship to the lynching experience.... We are bound together in Amercian by faith and tragedy. All the hatred we have expressed toward one another cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us.... No two people in America have had more violent and loving encounters than black and white people. We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus. No gulf between blacks and whites is too great to overcome, for our beauty is more enduring than our brutality. What God joined together, no one can tear apart.... If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation there is hope 'beyond tragedy.'"

Friday, August 18, 2017

The late, great Frederick Douglass (more great than late according some) was repulsed by the aggrandizement of Robert E. Lee. After the Civil War, attempts to rehabilitate Lee's honor included visits to the White House and newspaper editorials praising his character. The hope (and this came from Lincoln first and foremost) was that the country would look forward to a renewed unity rather than backward to a litany of grievances. In other words, it was politically advantageous (read: politically correct) to rehabilitate men like Lee via a generous forgetfulness. But from Douglass' perspective the effort to honor Lee was tantamount to propaganda. With Lee in mind and with tongue in cheek, Douglass mused that "the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven."

Cultural forgetfulness can happen in many different ways. But the shrewd political mind can manipulate this process if indeed that is deemed advantageous. One way to coax a nation toward forgetfulness is by replacing one emphasis with another. In Lee's case, his sins were cloaked by newspaper editorials extolling his "Christian" character. Deep down he was a "gentleman" according to the new narrative. This narrative spoke of the man's character over and against his treasonous and morally bankrupt acts of war. A generous forgetfulness.

In 1894 Douglass wrote that he was "not indifferent to the claims of a generous forgetfulness, but whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery; between those who fought to save the republic and those who fought to destroy it."

One of the consequences for rehabilitating Lee was to reinforce the social status of Douglass' people. In choosing to remember Lee as a fine, Christian gentleman, the nation was also choosing against the remembrance of other realities. I.e. the invention of Lee's moral character erected cultural blinders to the reality of continued persecution of the black populace. As a nation we were more concerned with triaging "white" shame and less concerned with remembering our collective sin. So Lee became a symbol to triage southern honor. And America began the process of white-washing its young, bloody history.

Lee's legacy was on the same post-war trajectory a generation later. His great sin continued to diminish while his great character continued to increase. This trajectory can be traced into the era of modern media.

Many (not all) statues and memorials of Robert E. Lee were erected on the southern landscape from the 1920s to the 60s. By the 1960s Lee's symbolic star had all but eclipsed his moral failure in the hearts of many "white" Americans. So we must ask, what does such a symbol mean if erected during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement? Haven't we moved beyond the category of a "generous forgetfulness" into outright propaganda? And isn't this exactly what Frederick Douglass warned us about?

If indeed some of these statues are relocated to museums we may have a partial solution. But I would suggest that these statues (if saved at all) are not appropriately placed in Civil War museums. They do not represent the Civil War. Rather, they represent morally bankrupt reactions to the African American experience. These statues do not represent a generous forgetfulness; they represent Jim Crow propaganda and anti-Civil Rights propaganda. In choosing to keep this propaganda around, we continue to enact a historic forgetfulness bordering on cultural amnesia. Of course, the chief problem with amnesia is that identities formed by past perceptions of reality are lost. We are in danger of losing our real-world continuity with history. In short, these statues facilitate our continued forgetfulness of history.

Finally, I have no doubt that our historic forgetfulness is built from a seed of truth. Lee exhibited certain elements of upright character. Perhaps he was a gentleman when he wasn't bathed in the blood of entire towns. I also have no doubt that Hitler was a conscientious vegetarian. But I wouldn't tolerate a statue of him outside Whole Foods.

In the tradition of The First Urban Christians by Wayne
Meeks, this book explores the relationship between the earliest
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self-understanding of the early Christian movement in urban settings.

The
book's contributors first look at how the urban physical, cultural,
and social environments of the ancient Mediterranean basin affected
the ways in which early Christianity progressed. They then turn to how
the earliest Christians thought and theologized in their engagement
with cities. With a rich variety of expertise and scholarship, The Urban World and the First Christians is an important contribution to the understanding of early Christianity.

Unfortunately, I can't simply post the pdfs, but if any readers of the Jesus Blog would like to have a copy of my essay for educational purposes, you are welcome to write to me at chris.keith@stmarys.ac.uk.

I am not surprised to have received a critical response to my earlier article. Historical Jesus studies is always a hotly debated subfield within New Testament studies, and right now there is much movement in the discussion with new proposals, defenses of the established, etc., etc. I made much effort in my response to Downing not simply to say, "He has misunderstood me here," because we all know that those are particularly boring responses. I'm relatively sure that I failed, though, because I do think that he misunderstood much of what I was arguing, and some of that may have been my fault for not being clear enough. I tried, therefore, to clarify. Nevertheless, there are simply some fundamental disagreements between us, and that's fine.

I'll give a short preview of one such disagreement from my response because it concerns an issue that, for me, is at the core of my critique of some prior Jesus research:

"According to Downing, 'A claim to "authenticity" is a claim to certainty'. No, it is not."

I will share the links to both articles when they're available. I'm told this issue will be out in September.

...a weblog dedicated to historical Jesus research and New Testament studies

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Le Donne, Keith, Pitre, Crossley, Jacobi, Rodríguez

James Crossley (PhD, Nottingham) is Professor of Bible, Society, and Politics at St. Mary's University, Twickenham, London. In addition to most things historical Jesus, his interests typically concern Jewish law and the Gospels, the social history of biblical scholarship, and the reception of the Bible in contemporary politics and culture. He is co-executive editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus.

Christine Jacobi studied protestant theology and art history in Berlin and Heidelberg. She is research associate at the chair of exegesis and theology of the New Testament and apocryphal writings. She completed her dissertation at the Humboldt-University of Berlin in 2014. She is the author of Jesusüberlieferung bei Paulus? Analogien zwischen den echten Paulusbriefen und den synoptischen Evangelien (BZNW 213), Berlin: de Gruyter 2015. Christine Jacobi is a member of the „August-Boeckh-Antikezentrum“ and the „Berliner Arbeitskreis für koptisch-gnostische Schriften“.

Chris Keith (PhD, Edinburgh) is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity and Director of the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London.

Anthony Le Donne (PhD, Durham) is Associate Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary. He is the author/editor of seven books. He is the co-founder of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Sacred Texts Consultation and the co-executive editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus.

Brant Pitre (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is Professor of Sacred Scripture at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. Among other works, he is the author of Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile (Mohr-Siebeck/Baker Academic, 2005), and Jesus and the Last Supper (Eerdmans, 2015). He is particularly interested in the relationship between Jesus, Second Temple Judaism, and Christian origins.

Rafael Rodríguez (PhD, Sheffield) is Professor of New Testament at Johnson University. He has published a number of books and essays on social memory theory, oral tradition, the Jesus tradition, and the historical Jesus, as well as on Paul and Pauline tradition. He also serves as co-chair of the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

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Jesus and the Last Supper

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Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text